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A SEAFARING CANON

It all started one morning in Maine, with a tattered copy of A Unit of Water, A Unit of Time, an account of the W-76 racing yacht that legendary wooden boat craftsman Joel White built after being diagnosed with cancer in 1996. The final page of that book was just the beginning of a two-year quest to read as many works as possible about the sea.

In this Snapchat era where the Twitterati rule, and my 9 to 5’s are spent glued to a computer screen, this undertaking gave me passport to adventure, from the voyages of madmen circumnavigating the Cape of Good Hope, to a 2,500-mile journey in a Sneakbox. Like all great expeditions, mine featured both exhilarating swells and duldroms. And I’d devoured 100 books. And I was left thirsting for more.

Below is a list of the works I read.

1. Four Months in a Sneak-Box: A Boat Voyage of 2600 Miles Down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and Along the Gulf of Mexico
By Nathaniel Holmes Bishop

2. NC Wyeth Biography
By David Michealis

3. Andrew Wyeth Biography
Richard Meryman

4. Woodswoman By Anne Labastille

5. One Man’s Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey
By Richard Proenneke

6. Wilderness: A Journey of Quiet Adventure in Alaska
By Rockwell Kent

7. Voyaging: Southward from the Straits of Magellan
By Rockwell Kent

8. Salmamina
By Rockwell Kent

9. N by E
By Rockwell Kent

10. Nat the Navigator: The Life of Nathanial Bowditch

11. The Hungry Ocean
By Linda Greenlaw

12. The Lobster Chronicles
By Linda Greenlaw

13, All Fishermen are Liars
By Linda Greenlaw

14. Sailing Around the World Alone
By Joshua Slocum

15. Three Ways to Capsize a boat
By Chris Stewart

16. Moby Dick
By Herman Melville

17. The Coast of Summer
By Anthony Bailey

18. The Thousand Dollar Yacht
By Anthony Bailey

19. Voyage for Madmen
By Peter Nichols

20. Final Voyage
By Peter Nichols

21. Sea Change: Alone across the Atlantic in a Wooden boat
By Peter Nichols

22. Wooden Boats: In Pursuit of the Perfect Craft at an American Boatyard
By Michael Ruhlman

23. A Unit of Water, A Unit of Time
Douglas Whynott

24. Wood, Water and Light: Classic Wooden Boats
By Joel White

25. Iain Oughtred: A Life in Wooden Boats
By Nic Compton

26. Schooner: Building a Wooden Boat on Martha’s Vinyard
By Tom Dunlop

27. The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float
By Farley Mowat

28. The Farfarers
By Farley Mowat

29: No Man’s River
By Farley Mowat

30. Otherwise
By Farley Mowat

31. Serpent’s Coil
By Farley Mowat

32. Bay of Spirits
By Farley Mowat

33. Eastern Passages
By Farley Mowat

34. Three Men in a Boat
By Jerome K. Jerome

35. American Saga: The Life and Times of Rockwell Kent
By David Traxel

36. Travels with Farley
By Claire Mowat

37. Voyage of the Paper Canoe
By Nathaniel Bishop

38. Survive the Savage Sea
Dougal Robertson

39. Adrift: 76 days lost at Sea
By Stephen Callahan

40. Voyage of the Liberdad
By Joshua Slocum

41. Prentiss Mulford Story: Life by Land and Sea
By Prentiss Mulford

42. The Heart of the Sea
Nathaniel Philbrick

43. Whale Hunt: The Narrative of a Journey
By Nelson Cole Haley

42. High Latitudes
By Farley Mowat

43. Northern Farm
By Henry Beston

44. Lido for Time
By Brad Alan Lewis

45. Assault on Lake Cassitas
By Brad Alan Lewis

46. The Amateurs
By David Halberstam

47. Between Wind and Water: A Book about the coast of Maine
By Gerald Warner Grace

48. Drawn to the Rhythm
By Sara Hall

49. The Boy, Me, and The Cat

50. The Log from a Sea of Cortez
By John Steinbeck

51. The Dove
By Robin L. Graham

52. Passage to Juno
By Jonathan Raban

53. Woman Overboard – Living the Dream
By Camille Gannon

54. Captain Nat Herreshoff: Boys of Bristol
By L. Francis Herreshoff

55. The Long Way
By Bernard Metessier

56. The Motion of the Ocean: 1 Small Boat, 2 Average Lovers, and a Woman’s Search for the Meaning of Wife
By Janna Cawrse Esarey

57. The Big Oyster
By Mark Kurlansky

58. The Cure for Anything is Salt Water
By Mary South

59. Kook
By Peter Heller

60. Saltwater Buddha
By Jamal Yogis

61. The Wave
By Susan Casey

62. Latitude
By Dava Sobel

63. First You Have to Row a Little Boat
By Richard Bode

64. Down at the Docks
By Rory Nugent

65. The Big One: An Island, An Obsession and the Furious Pursuit of a Great Fish
By David Kinney

66. We Were an Island
By Peter P. Blanchard

67. On the Run: An Angler’s Journey Down the Striper Coast
By David DiBenedetto

68. The Hard Way Around
By Geoffrey Wolff

69. The Edge of Maine
By Geoffrey Wolff

70. The Survival of the Bark Canoe
By John McPhee

71. The Travel Journals of Tappan Adney
By C. Ted Behne

72. The Voyageur
By Grace Lee Nute

73. Sloop
By Daniel Robb

74. Herman Melville
By Elizabeth Hardwick

75. The Year of the Boat
Lawrence W. Cheek

76. The Whale
By Philip Hoare

77. Fair Wind and Plenty of It
By Rigel Crockett

78. My Discovery of America
By Farley Mowat

79. Let’s Take the Long Way Home
By Gail Caldwell

80. Kayak Morning
By Roger Rosenblatt

81. The Voyageur’s Highway
By Grace Lee Nute

82. The Spray
R.D. Culler

83. Ice
By Tristan Jones

84. Down in Bristol Bay
By Bob Durr

85. Dorothy Elizabeth
By Roger Duncan

86. Nathaniel’s Nutmeg
By Giles Milton

87. Atlantic
By Simon Winchester

88. American Traveler
By James Zug

89. The Shipping News
By Annie Proulx

90. Men’s Lives
By Peter Matthiessen

91.The Brendan Voyage
By Tim Severin

92. Sperm Whaling from New Bedford
By Elton W. Hall

93. Two Years Before the Mast
By Richard Henry Dana

94. A Fighting Chance
By John Ridgway and Chay Blyth

95. The Perfect Storm
By Sebastian Junger

96. Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America
By Tappan Adney and Howard Chappelle